1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to a method of a UEFI firmware and computer system thereof; particularly, the present disclosure relates to a method and computer system for executing a UEFI firmware supporting pairing of Bluetooth devices to the computer system during pre-boot initialization.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditionally, computing systems may boot to an operating system. The boot up of the operating system is typically handled by a low level instruction code that is used as an intermediary between the hardware components of the computing system and the operating software and other high level software executing on the computing system. This low level instruction code is often known as the Basic Input/Output System (“BIOS”) firmware and provides a set of software routines that allow high level software to interact with the hardware components of the computing system. The firmware performs routines for conducting Power-On Self Test (“POST”) each time the computing system is powered on in order to test and initiate all hardware components in the computing system before handing off control to the operating system. These hardware components may include the system main memory, disk drives, and keyboards.
However, as technology has progressed with many devices such as peripheral devices advancing towards being wireless or cordless, boot up firmwares based on the traditional BIOS standard, which was originally designed for personal computers of International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), have become a point of restriction or limitation as to what the boot up firmware may control with respect to hardware and subsequently what hardware the Operating System may control. As new hardware and software technologies were being developed, this source of restriction became a major obstacle in the hardware-software interaction. As a result, a new standard of BIOS firmware has been proposed and widely adopted by many major industry leaders. This new standard is called the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).
With the adoption of UEFI standards, BIOS companies were able to produce UEFI firmware for computing systems, while companies producing Operating Systems were able to take advantage of the services these UEFI firmware provided by producing UEFI compliant Operating Systems. However, traditionally, wireless devices such as Bluetooth devices cannot be paired to the computer system during the pre-boot initialization period before the boot up firmware hands off control to the Operating System since the wireless devices are not physically connected to the computer system. For the manufacturers of the computer system, wireless devices that are sold as a package with the computer system would need to be manually connected and paired with each computer system before the computer systems are shipped out to be sold to the users; otherwise, users would need the technical knowledge to install these wireless devices manually to the computer system. As well, in terms of users buying third party wireless devices to pair with the computer system, users would not be able to access control of the boot up firmware through the wireless device without running the system once through to the Operating System stage in order to manually pair the wireless device to the computer system. In either case, the user is burdened with the task of manually installing the wireless device to the computer system when the wireless device is first presented to the computer system. Therefore, there is a need to reduce the installation complexities and frustration of the user that come from having to spend time and effort to manually install wireless devices to UEFI compliant Computer Systems.